Understanding One Another
Bullying
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Prisons, nursing homes, and British boarding schools can share a structure: one authority, rigid schedules, common rules, and little freedom. In Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug uses sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘total institutions’ to examine why such environments foster bullying. Agora offers the counterexample — an open, mixed-age school where difference is normal and bullying is nearly absent.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
“The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
Bullying is often regarded as a quirk of our nature; something that is part and parcel of being a kid. Not so, say sociologists, who over the years have compiled extensive research on the places where gullying is endemic. The call these total institutions. Sociologist Erving Goffman, writing some fifty years ago, described them as follows:
*Everybody lives in the same place and is subject to a single authority. *All activities are carried out together and everybody does the same tasks. *Activities are rigidly scheduled, often from one hour to the next. *There is a system of explicit, formal rules imposed by an authority.
Of course, the ultimate example is a prison, where bullying runs rampant. But total institutions show up in other places, too, such as nursing homes. The elderly, when penned together, can develop caste systems in which the biggest bullies claim the best seats and tables at Bingo time. One American expert on bullying even calls bingo, ‘the devil’s game.’
And then there are schools. Bullying is by far the most pervasive at typical British boarding schools (the kind that inspired William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.). And little wonder: these schools resemble nothing so much as prisons. You can’t leave, you have to earn a place in a rigid hierarchy, and there’s strict division between pupils and staff. These competitive institutions are part and parcel of Britain’s upper class establishment—many London politicians went to boarding schools—but according to education scientists, they thwart our playful nature.
The good news is that things can be different. Bullying is practical non-existent at unstructured schools such as Agora. Here you can take a breather whenever you need one: the doors are always open. And, more importantly, everyone is different. Difference is normal, because children of all ages, abilities, and levels intermingle.